The Home Office is proposing a massive 25% increase in already high immigration application fees for families for the year 2016-17. Family and spouse visas will in future cost £1,195. The maximum chargable for these applications will be increased from £2,141 to £3,250. The fee for a settlement application will increase to £1,875 and to £2,676 for Adult Dependant Relatives.

British citizen naturalisation fees for adults will increase to £1,156 and child registration fees to £936, which also represent 25% increases.

By comparison, a large multinational company applying for a Tier 2 sponsor licence to enable it to recruit foreign workers needs to pay a fee of £1,476. This fee is not being increased.

Immigration Minister John McCallum says he’s planning on introducing changes in the “next couple of months” that will grant permanent resident status to the sponsored spouses of Canadians, immediately, upon arriving in Canada.

“When spouses come in now, they don’t immediately become permanent residents; there’s a two-year period where they are not yet permanent residents,” Mr. McCallum (Markham-Thornhill, Ont.) said in an interview with The Hill Times. “We said in our platform that we will end that so that they will become permanent residents on arrival.”

Under the EU citizens’ Directive, currently EU citizens can bring with them to another Member State their spouse or partner, the children of both (or either) who are under 21 or dependent, and the dependent parents of either. This applies regardless of whether the family members are EU citizens or not. No further conditions are possible, besides the prospect of a refusal of entry (or subsequent expulsion) on grounds of public policy, public security or public health (on which, see below).

In principle EU law does not apply to UK citizens who wish to bring non-EU family members to the UK, so the UK is free to put in place restrictive rules in those cases (which it has done, as regards income requirements and language rules). However, the CJEU has ruled that UK citizens can move to another Member State and be joined by non-EU family members there, under the more generous rules in the EU legislation.

One of the issues the Supreme Court may examine is whether the foreign spouse’s income might count towards the threshold. At present, some low-earning British expatriates have trouble moving back from abroad with their foreign spouse, even if that partner is a high earner. The court has the power to declare these rules unlawful, though that is unlikely, believes Ms Grant. In the absence of many other ways of reducing immigration, the government will want to cling on to the strict new rules, for better or worse.

According to IPS estimates, non-EU family migration to the UK increased from an average of 35,000 per year in the 1990s to 45,000 in 2013, or 20% of all non-EU immigration that year. These estimates include both dependents and family unification migrants. Family migration, like overall migration to the UK, increased from 1997 to the mid-2000s, peaking at 74,000 in 2006 (see figure 1). Also similar to other categories of migration, family migration declined in the second half of the 2000s. But these shifts in family migration were smaller in magnitude than similar shifts in migration for work or study. As a result of these trends, family migration comprises a smaller share of overall migration now than it did in the 1990s (see our the Migration Observatory briefing on Immigration by Category: Workers, Students, Family Members, Asylum Applicants). Although this briefing focuses on non-EU migration, it is worth noting that, including EU nationals, family migration is now at similar levels to the 1990s. LTIM estimates of family migration were 90,000 in 1991 and averaged 75,000 during the 1990s. LTIM estimates had increased to 105,000 by 2006 but fell to 71,000 in 2013.

3.71 A surprisingly large number of those who attended the detainee forum I organised had been detained because of allegedly sham marriages. Most had been detained after Home Office interviews in Liverpool or Manchester. The questions they said they had been asked by caseworkers to ascertain whether their marriage was a sham included their knowledge of their wife’s National Insurance number, the colour of her underwear, and her bra size. If this was indeed the case, it is questionable whether such questions were either appropriate or useful.

David Cameron has been accused of stigmatising Muslim women after he announced plans to help them learn English and warned that migrant spouses who fail language tests may have to leave the UK.Announcing the plans on Monday, the prime minister suggested the language classes for Muslim women could help stop radicalisation.

The federal immigration department has said it will be accepting the same number of applications this year as it did in 2015 from parents and grandparents wanting to join family members in Canada, despite a Liberal election promise to double the intake “immediately.”